Black Friday – a good deal for a local children's charity

This year, What You Sow will be donating to charity instead of offering discounts to customers on Black Friday.

For every single item sold via whatyousow.co.uk on Black Friday 2017 (Friday 24th November) What You Sow will donate a gift to children’s lunch club charity CHOMP.

What does CHOMP do?

CHOMP is a charity based in Brighton which provides free healthy lunches and fun activities to children and their families during the school holidays. Many low-income families, who rely on free school meals in term-time, struggle to eat well during the school holidays and have difficulty finding additional money for lunches. These families come under extra pressure at Christmas with the cost of gifts, toys and treats for their children all mounting up.

Last year What You Sow donated 50 colouring and activity books which were wrapped up and given to the children at the Christmas lunch club. This year we hope to donate even more and the gifts will be delivered to CHOMP by the What You Sow team during the week following Black Friday.

Watch this lovely video about CHOMP:

What is Black Friday?

Black Friday is a day of pre-Christmas discounts offered by retailers on the 4th Friday in November, the phenomenon started in the US in the early 2000’s and has since become the busiest shopping day of the year. Black Friday arrived in the UK a few years ago. It is becoming notorious for the level of hysteria created, with reports of people fighting and falling over each other in the scramble for bargains.

Why is What You Sow offering a charity deal for Black Friday?

We have watched uneasily as Black Friday has escalated to its current level. We believe that Christmas should be a time of joy, love and generosity and the act of gift giving should be a part of this (I mean, we’ve all read Little Women). Also, we are a very small business and we frankly cannot afford to compete with the high street. Offering loss-making discounts is not the way we want our business to run and it is not sustainable for us. We would like to counter the Black Friday hype by inviting our customers to choose a different reason for shopping with us on on 24th November.

We know our customers and they shop with us not only because they love the carefully chosen range of beautiful gardening gifts that we offer but also because they like to support small businesses. We believe they will be much happier supporting a charity on Black Friday than seeing our business struggle because we are trying to match the extreme level of discounting set by the major retailers.

Owner Lyndsey Haskell says of the Black Friday Charity deal “It’s important to us at What You Sow to help those in our community who need a bit of a hand and we’ve been doing this since we launched in 2012 by volunteering on community gardens and helping out at our local food charity FareShare. In Brighton, 1 in 4 children is estimated to be living in food poverty, so we are delighted to be able to support CHOMP this Christmas“.

Chomp project manager Amy Goodwin said of last year's donations "We're really grateful for the Black Friday Christmas present donations for Chomp last year. This was the first year we were able to give a small gift from Santa to spread Christmas cheer to our regular families".

We would like to say thank you to everyone who supported this initiative and continues to do so and we hope that you will enjoy shopping at What You Sow knowing that you are helping provide healthy meals to lots of families who might not otherwise have all that much to eat this Christmas.

Thank you.

About What You Sow

What You Sow is an online retailer offering a carefully curated range of gifts for gardeners. The What You Sow shop sells pretty and practical gardening gifts and accessories including seeds, books, plant pots, tools, stationery and notebooks, gorgeous homewares, art prints and jewellery. Much of the stock comes from independent designer makers and everything has been thoughtfully sourced to offer a superb assortment of contemporary gardening-themed articles to browse and buy.

P.S. This stuff is genuinely important to us, read about the other charity initiatives we are involved in and see some of the photos that What You Sow owner Lyndsey Haskell has taken for local charities in and around Brighton & Hove.